[clue] [resolved] seeking advice cleaning up root

Mike Bean mike.bean at rocketmail.com
Mon Mar 21 07:02:16 MDT 2011



A quick thanks for all the comments and insights, the issue is more or less 
resolved for the time being.  I bit the bullet and used the gparted live CD to 
increase the root partition to 20gb.   I found a listing somewhere that 
canonical says the recommended minimum is 8GB, and though I didn't double 
check/verify the information, I thought I was skirting uncomfortably close to 
it; and I was having difficulty seeing reasonable to ways to shrink it much 
further then that.  True, there's a certain amount of risk in moving/resizing 
partitions, but I've been looking for an excuse to graduate from Ubuntu to one 
of the more advanced distros anyway.

Bean



________________________________
From: Jon 'maddog' Hall <maddog at li.org>
To: CLUE's mailing list <clue at cluedenver.org>
Sent: Sun, March 20, 2011 6:39:20 PM
Subject: Re: [clue] seeking advice cleaning up root

Ahem,

I will not comment on the issue of using symbolic links, but I do not
think I can let this statement slide by:

>Good programmers do not. They take the time to learn enough about the
>OS to write the most optimal code available.

"Most optimal code" is in the eye of the beholder.  Often the trade-off
in saving machine cycles is overwhelmed by the human time lost in doing
the optimization.

I will be the first person to state that a good programmer should know
how a compiler generates code, and may even alter their code so a
particular compiler (gcc for instance) will generate more optimal code.
It is one of the reasons why I despair over computer science departments
that do not teach machine and assembler language.  I do not expect
people to spend much of their coding career writing assembler, but they
should understand the trade offs of the computer architectures.

However, if we were to all generate "most optimal code" (meaning most
efficient code) all the time, then we probably would not get much done,
and probably we should be ignoring the operating system and writing to
the bare metal.

>(For the record: Most of us who write in bash, perl, php, python, ruby
>etc are *scripters* and not programmers.)

I consider "scripters" to be "programmers", and particularly if it is a
one-off job.  The shell programs in Unix have been fairly optimized over
the years to give good performance, and the programmer who recognizes
the trade-offs between writing, testing and debugging new "C" code to do
a task versus writing a simple script that does the same thing (to me)
is the sign of a great programmer, not just a "good" one.

Warmest regards,

maddog

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